Set your watches for Rooney Recovery Time

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Anyone tempted to suggest Wayne Rooney’s minor groin injury might give him a nice rest before the World Cup would be wise to fire up their copy of the Mathematica GraphMonkey iPad app* and first try to factor in one of the great immeasurables of English football — Rooney Recovery Time.

Rooney Recovery Time is comparable in its unfathomability only to Scotty’s estimates of how long it would take to get warp engines back on line as the Enterprise hurtled towards a collapsing Lime Dyson sphere*.

Rooney was in the stands on Saturday as United kept the heat on Chelsea with a 3-1 win over Tottenham Hotspur. Alex Ferguson then set the scene for weeks of excited punditry by suggesting the striker may have played his last game of the domestic campaign.

“It’s difficult to say, groin injuries are groin injuries and I think it probably will maybe take two to three weeks to be honest,” he told Sky Sports television.

Asked whether he would play again this season, the Scot hedged it a bit, saying only: “We’ll try. Obviously we’ll give him every chance and Wayne will be desperate to play himself. But we’ll just have to wait and see.”

Now, you could read that as bad news for United and good news for England.

On the other hand, it cannot have escaped people’s attention that when it comes to Rooney, weeks can mean days, days can mean weeks and bandages and crutches can mean not much at all.

This was the man who appeared in the starting lineup for the second leg of the Champions League quarter-final against Bayern Munich a matter of days after the papers were worrying about his World Cup participation.

What two or three weeks means this time is frankly anyone’s guess.

* Not actually a real thing.

PIX: Wayne Rooney photo by Phil Noble. James Doohan, Scotty himself, photographed by James Blevins in 2004, a year before the actor’s death.